ALBERT

Description: Near a black hole, differential rotation of a magnetized accretion disk is thought to produce an instability that amplifies weak magnetic fields, driving accretion and outflow. These magnetic fields would naturally give rise to the observed synchrotron emission in galaxy cores and to the formation of relativistic jets, but no observations to date have been able to resolve the expected horizon-scale magnetic-field structure. We report interferometric observations at 1.3-millimeter wavelength that spatially resolve the linearly polarized emission from the Galactic Center supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. We have found evidence for partially ordered magnetic fields near the event horizon, on scales of ~6 Schwarzschild radii, and we have detected and localized the intrahour variability associated with these fields.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Johnson, Michael D -- Fish, Vincent L -- Doeleman, Sheperd S -- Marrone, Daniel P -- Plambeck, Richard L -- Wardle, John F C -- Akiyama, Kazunori -- Asada, Keiichi -- Beaudoin, Christopher -- Blackburn, Lindy -- Blundell, Ray -- Bower, Geoffrey C -- Brinkerink, Christiaan -- Broderick, Avery E -- Cappallo, Roger -- Chael, Andrew A -- Crew, Geoffrey B -- Dexter, Jason -- Dexter, Matt -- Freund, Robert -- Friberg, Per -- Gold, Roman -- Gurwell, Mark A -- Ho, Paul T P -- Honma, Mareki -- Inoue, Makoto -- Kosowsky, Michael -- Krichbaum, Thomas P -- Lamb, James -- Loeb, Abraham -- Lu, Ru-Sen -- MacMahon, David -- McKinney, Jonathan C -- Moran, James M -- Narayan, Ramesh -- Primiani, Rurik A -- Psaltis, Dimitrios -- Rogers, Alan E E -- Rosenfeld, Katherine -- SooHoo, Jason -- Tilanus, Remo P J -- Titus, Michael -- Vertatschitsch, Laura -- Weintroub, Jonathan -- Wright, Melvyn -- Young, Ken H -- Zensus, J Anton -- Ziurys, Lucy M -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Dec 4;350(6265):1242-5. doi: 10.1126/science.aac7087. Epub 2015 Dec 3.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. mjohnson@cfa.harvard.edu. ; Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Westford, MA 01886, USA. ; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Westford, MA 01886, USA. ; Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, 933 North Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721-0065, USA. ; Department of Astronomy, Radio Astronomy Laboratory, 501 Campbell, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3411, USA. ; Department of Physics MS-057, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-0911. ; Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Westford, MA 01886, USA. National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Osawa 2-21-1, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan. Department of Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. ; Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Post Office Box 23-141, Taipei 10617, Taiwan. ; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. ; Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), 645 N. A'ohoku Pl. Hilo, HI 96720, USA. ; Department of Astrophysics/Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics, Radboud University Nijmegen, Post Office Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, Netherlands. ; Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, ON N2L 2Y5, Canada. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada. ; Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Giessenbachstrasse 1, 85748 Garching, Germany. ; James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, East Asia Observatory, 660 N. A'ohoku Place, University Park, Hilo, HI 96720, USA. ; Department of Physics, Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland at College Park, Physical Sciences Complex, College Park, MD 20742, USA. ; National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Osawa 2-21-1, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan. Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Mitaka, 2-21-1 Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588. ; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Westford, MA 01886, USA. Department of Physics MS-057, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-0911. ; Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hugel 69, D-53121 Bonn, Germany. ; Owens Valley Radio Observatory, California Institute of Technology, 100 Leighton Lane, Big Pine, CA 93513-0968, USA. ; Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Westford, MA 01886, USA. Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hugel 69, D-53121 Bonn, Germany. ; Department of Astrophysics/Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics, Radboud University Nijmegen, Post Office Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, Netherlands. Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Post Office Box 9513, 2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26785487" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: © The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Environmental Research Letters 11 (2016): 034004, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034004.

Description: Residential yards across the US look remarkably similar despite marked variation in climate and soil, yet the drivers of this homogenization are unknown. Telephone surveys of fertilizer and irrigation use and satisfaction with the natural environment, and measurements of inherent water and nitrogen availability in six US cities (Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Los Angeles) showed that the percentage of people using irrigation at least once in a year was relatively invariant with little difference between the wettest (Miami, 85%) and driest (Phoenix, 89%) cities. The percentage of people using fertilizer at least once in a year also ranged narrowly (52%–71%), while soil nitrogen supply varied by 10x. Residents expressed similar levels of satisfaction with the natural environment in their neighborhoods. The nature and extent of this satisfaction must be understood if environmental managers hope to effect change in the establishment and maintenance of residential ecosystems.

Description: We would like to acknowledge the MacroSystems Biology Program, in the Emerging Frontiers Division of the Biological Sciences Directorate at NSF for support. The 'Ecological Homogenization of Urban America' project was supported by a series of collaborative grants from this program (EF-1065548, 1065737, 1065740, 1065741, 1065772, 1065785, 1065831, 121238320). The work arose from research funded by grants from the NSF Long Term Ecological Research Program supporting work in Baltimore (DEB-0423476), Phoenix (BCS-1026865, DEB-0423704 and DEB-9714833), Plum Island (Boston) (OCE-1058747 and 1238212), Cedar Creek (Minneapolis-St. Paul) (DEB-0620652) and Florida Coastal Everglades (Miami) (DBI-0620409).

Description: The use of proteasome inhibitors to target cancer’s dependence on altered protein homeostasis has been greatly limited by intrinsic and acquired resistance. Analyzing data from thousands of cancer lines and tumors, we find that those with suppressed expression of one or more 19S proteasome subunits show intrinsic proteasome inhibitor resistance. Moreover, such proteasome subunit suppression is associated with poor outcome in myeloma patients, where proteasome inhibitors are a mainstay of treatment. Beyond conferring resistance to proteasome inhibitors, proteasome subunit suppression also serves as a sentinel of a more global remodeling of the transcriptome. This remodeling produces a distinct gene signature and new vulnerabilities to the proapoptotic drug, ABT-263. This frequent, naturally arising imbalance in 19S regulatory complex composition is achieved through a variety of mechanisms, including DNA methylation, and marks the emergence of a heritably altered and therapeutically relevant state in diverse cancers.

Description: Ray tracing radiative transfer is a powerful method for comparing theoretical models of black hole accretion flows and jets with observations. We present a public code, grtrans , for carrying out such calculations in the Kerr metric, including the full treatment of polarised radiative transfer and parallel transport along geodesics. The code is written in fortran 90 and efficiently parallelises with openmp , and the full code and several components have python interfaces. We describe several tests which are used for verifiying the code, and we compare the results for polarised thin accretion disc and semi-analytic jet problems with those from the literature as examples of its use. Along the way, we provide accurate fitting functions for polarised synchrotron emission and transfer coefficients from thermal and power-law distribution functions, and compare results from numerical integration and quadrature solutions of the polarised radiative transfer equations. We also show that all transfer coefficients can play an important role in predicted images and polarisation maps of the Galactic centre black hole, Sgr A*, at submillimetre wavelengths.

Description: Plant responses to natural enemies include formation of secondary metabolites acting as direct or indirect defenses. Volatile terpenes represent one of the most diverse groups of secondary metabolites. We aimed to explore evolutionary patterns of volatile terpene emission. We measured the composition of damage-induced volatile terpenes from 202 Amazonian tree species, spanning the angiosperm phylogeny. Volatile terpenes were extracted with solid-phase micro extraction and desorbed in a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry for compound identification. The chemical diversity of the terpene blend showed a strong phylogenetic signal as closely related species emitted a similar number of compounds. Closely related species also tended to have compositionally similar blends, although this relationship was weak. Meanwhile, the ability to emit a given compound showed no significant phylogenetic signal for 200 of 286 compounds, indicating a high rate of diversification in terpene synthesis and/or great variability in their expression. Three lineages (Magnoliales, Laurales, and Sapindales) showed exceptionally high rates of terpene diversification. Of the 70 compounds found in 〉10% of their species, 69 displayed significant correlated evolution with at least one other compound. These results provide insights into the complex evolutionary history of volatile terpenes in angiosperms, while highlighting the need for further research into this important class of compounds. We explored evolutionary patterns of volatile terpene emission, using volatile terpenes composition for 202 Amazonian tree species. Three lineages (Magnoliales, Laurales, Sapindales) showed higher rates of compound origin.

Description: Biochemistry DOI: 10.1021/acs.biochem.6b00161

Description: The challenge of feeding nine billion people by 2050, in a context of constrained resources and growing environmental pressures posed by current food production methods on one side, and changing lifestyles and consequent shifts in dietary patterns on the other, exacerbated by the effects of climate change, has been defined as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. The first step to achieve food security is to find a balance between the growing demand for food, and the limited production capacity. In order to do this three main pathways have been identified: employing sustainable production methods in agriculture, changing diets, and reducing waste in all stages of the food chain. The application of an energy, water and food nexus (EWFN) approach, which takes into account the interactions and connections between these three resources, and the synergies and trade-offs that arise from the way they are managed, is a prerequisite for the correct application of these pathways. This work discusses how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) might be applicable for creating the evidence-base to foster such desired shifts in food production and consumption patterns.

Description: Residential yards across the US look remarkably similar despite marked variation in climate and soil, yet the drivers of this homogenization are unknown. Telephone surveys of fertilizer and irrigation use and satisfaction with the natural environment, and measurements of inherent water and nitrogen availability in six US cities (Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Los Angeles) showed that the percentage of people using irrigation at least once in a year was relatively invariant with little difference between the wettest (Miami, 85%) and driest (Phoenix, 89%) cities. The percentage of people using fertilizer at least once in a year also ranged narrowly (52%–71%), while soil nitrogen supply varied by 10x. Residents expressed similar levels of satisfaction with the natural environment in their neighborhoods. The nature and extent of this satisfaction must be understood if environmental managers hope to effect change in the establishment and maintenance of resid...